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When you get a new long distance plan, do you worry if the plan you picked isn't the most popular plan? Do you decide it means you got a 'loser plan'? Me neit

When you get a new long distance plan, do you worry if the plan you picked isn't the most popular plan? Do you decide it means you got a 'loser plan'? Me neither. To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere." But Firefox market share was going up at some point... by the same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over everything? As an explanation, it's devoid. The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of 3-5% of a market can basically set standards). IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially 'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider that success.

Paul-ish 9y ago
One issue is that building a browser take engineers, and that takes a lot of money. Mozilla makes its money from search partnerships; they make money every time someone uses default search. If less people are using Firefox, less people are using default search, which in turn means less revenue. This means fewer engineers. If they don't have enough engineers to maintain Firefox, the browser falls apart. I am skeptical that Firefox could be maintained by donations or volunteers when its competitors are backed by large companies. A response is that even if Firefox's share falls, that the absolute number of Firefox users continues to rise. ie that the total market is growing. In this case Mozilla would still be generating the revenue it needs to keep going. The author brushes this possibility off in the beginning of the article, saying that browsers are a thing of the past.

Paul-ish 9y ago

One issue is that building a browser take engineers, and that takes a lot of money. Mozilla makes its money from search partnerships; they make money every time someone uses default search. If less people are using Firefox, less people are using default search, which in turn means less revenue. This means fewer engineers. If they don't have enough engineers to maintain Firefox, the browser falls apart. I am skeptical that Firefox could be maintained by donations or volunteers when its competitors are backed by large companies. A response is that even if Firefox's share falls, that the absolute number of Firefox users continues to rise. ie that the total market is growing. In this case Mozilla would still be generating the revenue it needs to keep going. The author brushes this possibility off in the beginning of the article, saying that browsers are a thing of the past.